EduBits

NEWS

Welcome to the latest installment of “EduBits,”
your quarterly pipeline to new
and exciting happenings in the
world of ACM Education. In this
edition, updates on ACM curricular
work from the Joint Task Force
on Cybersecurity Education and
IT2017 Steering Committee, and
the release of the CE2016 curricular
recommendation in computer
engineering. There is also news
from the new Retention Committee
exploring issues facing women and
underrepresented minority students
in undergraduate CS programs,
and news from the latest Learning
at Scale conference.

Initiated by the ACM EducationBoard in September 2015, the JointTask Force for Cybersecurity Educa-tion (Cyber JTF) is a collaborationamong international computingsocieties, including the Associationfor Computing Machinery (ACM),IEEE Computer Society (IEEE CS),Association for Information SystemsSpecial Interest Group on Security(AIS SIGSEC), and InternationalFederation for Information Process-ing Technical Committee on Infor-mation Security Education (IFIP WG

11. 8). The Cyber JTF grew out of the
foundational efforts of the Cyber Education Project (CEP). It was formed
with the explicit purpose of developing comprehensive, undergraduate
curricular guidance in cybersecurity
education that will support future
program development and associated educational efforts [ 4].

Readers may recall an update
published in an earlier EduBits [ 7].

Since then, the Cyber JTF has beenquite busy. During January 2017, theJTF published its first draft for publicreview and comment. There weremore than 1,400 downloads from theJTF website. Industry, government,and academic stakeholders frommore than 13 countries, such as theUnited Kingdom, Canada, Singapore,and Australia, responded to the callproviding substantive feedback thatinformed the second public draft. Inaddition, the JTF received fundingfrom the National Security Agencyto extend its work by linking thecurricular guidance to the NationalCybersecurity Workforce Frame-work. The second public draft wasreleased in early June 2017 in timefor prominent cyber educationconferences in the United States,all taking place that month—theNational Cybersecurity Summit, theColloquium for Information SystemsSecurity Education (CISSE), and theCommunity College CybersecuritySummit (3CS). The review periodfor the second and last public draftextends through the middle of July2017 with feedback collection at theJTF website [ 4].

To date, the work of the Cyber
JTF has informed the U.S. Presidential Commission on Cybersecurity,
and in February 2017, Co-Chair Dr.

Diana Burley was invited to testify
before a Congressional hearing
of the Research and Technology
Subcommittee (of the Science,

In March at SIGCSE 2017, the [Cyber]JTF presented a spirited special session,and hosted a well-attended affiliatedevent entitled, “Seeking Global,Industry and Training ProviderPerspectives to Inform the Joint TaskForce for Cybersecurity Education.”